The goal of this study is to decrypt visual rhetoric and strategies employed by Peruvian artists during the sixties and the seventies. The focus of the analysis is on the dynamics of persuasion based on visual imagery that seeks a particular emotional reaction –difficult to obtain through verbal discourses – that potentially results in its audience embracing a political stance. In this research, this methodological and conceptual framework is applied to the specific context of Peru between the years 1967 to 1980. During this period, the media first and then the state sought to dominate the public sphere with political discourses where visual imagery played a key role. During thirteen years, the country went from a democratic system to a military junta and back to a democracy that was very different to the previous one that had been overthrown by the army. During these years, defined by three presidential periods, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1963-1968), General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975), and finally General Francisco Morales Bermúdez (1975-1980), visual imagery, through caricature and graphic propaganda, had a fundamental role in the construction and dissemination of political discourses about the presidency and national identity. In this thesis I describe and explain how the media and the different governments relied on visual imagery to transform intangible discourses in concrete and memorable representations.

Dans le contexte latinoaméricain de l’entre-deux guerres caractérisé par la reconfiguration des champs d’intervention des États libéraux, cette recherche interroge la restructuration de l’appareil étatique au Pérou à la lumière du double discours de la rupture et de la régénération porté par le régime de la Patrie Nouvelle du président Augusto B. Leguía (1919-1930). La profonde crise qui caractérise l’après Première Guerre mondiale rend nécessaire l’appel à des formes d’expertise censées apporter des réponses pragmatiques et efficaces aux nouveaux défis socio-économiques. Le projet léguiiste se traduit dans l’émergence d’une nouvelle rationalité politique et administrative concernant la gestion des populations, du territoire et des ressources naturelles. La thèse entend montrer comment se déploient les logiques d’action et de connaissance de l’État centralisé dans les marges du territoire national. En se penchant sur les formes d’exploration de l’Amazonie péruvienne, ainsi que sur les activités des ingénieurs (civils et militaires) qui s’y déroulent, cette recherche éclaire le lien étroit entre formation d’élites techniques, production des savoirs géographiques et construction de l’État. / This research focuses on the restructuring of the Peruvian state, in the light of the double discourse of rupture and regeneration promoted by the New Homeland (Patria Nueva) regime of President Augusto B. Leguía (1919-1930), during an inter-war period characterised by the reconfiguration of Latin-American liberal states’ fields of intervention. The profound crisis which marked the period after the First World War rendered necessary those forms of expertise which were supposed to bring pragmatic and effective answers to new socio-economic challenges. Leguía’s project leads to the formation of a new political and administrative rationality concerning the management of populations, territory and natural resources. This thesis seeks to examine how the centralised State’s logics of action and knowledge are deployed at the margins of the national territory. By focusing on the forms of exploration of the Peruvian Amazon, as well as on the activities of civil and military engineers which take place there, this research sheds light on the close relationship between the formation of technical elites, the production of geographic knowledge and construction of the State.

This dissertation examines the political prospects of rural subaltern groups in the era of neoliberal globalisation by engaging with the ‘death of the peasantry’ debates. To achieve this, it concentrates on rural resistance in the northern highlands of Peru, Cajamarca, against ‘new mineral extraction’ by multinational capital in the form of Minera Yanacocha S.A. (MYSA), with a theoretical framework of critical geography on transnational activism. In particular, the dissertation devotes attention to the massive mobilisations against MYSA’s Conga mining project between 2011 and 2013. The dispossession and disempowerment of the peasantry have been highlighted as the accumulation of global capital has intensified alongside the implementation of market-led development models around the globe. In the 1990s, the extraction and export of abundant natural resources was promoted as a ‘new development alternative’. In tandem with the unprecedented width and depth of resource extraction, the continent has become witness to increasing incidences of struggles led by local communities, particularly in the countryside. Recent Peruvian economic growth has been boosted by a ‘new mining boom’. Simultaneously, many Peruvians are protesting against mining activities, particularly due to their negative social and environmental impact. Cajamarca is one obvious example where neoliberal mineral extraction has generated a series of local struggles since the arrival of MYSA in 1993. The asymmetrical power of multinational capital vis-à-vis campesinos stands out in the context of the emphasis of the central government on ‘national development’ based on natural resource extraction. Against this backdrop, this dissertation examines the re-articulation of rural subjectivities and the political possibilities in their ‘networked form of resistance’, instead of focusing on the fragmentation, powerlessness and passivity of subaltern groups in the face of global capital power. Economic reductionism restricts our understanding of neoliberal globalisation to the exploitation of global capital vs. dispossession of local communities. Following Doreen Massey’s relational geographical approach, the dissertation maintains that it is relevant to understand the ‘relational content’ of global capital mobility and complex dynamics of resistance. In addition, the dualistic framework of geography and power which is based on an essentialist geographical understanding of the spatial (i.e. space/place; powerful global and powerless local) tends to regard local resistance as ‘reactionary’ place-based struggle. Instead, the dissertation focuses on the ‘interconnectedness’ of subaltern groups. It argues that diverse social groups shape what Featherstone terms ‘prefigurative solidarity’ around ‘maps of grievance’, via political resistance. In this process, a political identity is constructed in order to bring neoliberal globalisation into contestation.